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Hiroshi Mikitani, one of Japan’s most notorious entrepreneurs, arrived at Kobo headquarters in Toronto with a fluttering entourage of staff.

They ushered him in, fetched water, helped swap out his chair, which was not right in some imperceptible way, and scribbled furiously on to notepads when he waved in their general direction.

Mikitani owns Kobo, the e-reader business he bought from Indigo Books and Music Inc. CEO Heather Reisman in a $315-million (U.S.) deal that closed last year. It was win for Reisman, who was facing a decline in book sales and was struggling with the costs of launching Kobo.

Whether it was a win for Mikitani was the question.

The first Kobo was a buggy device and the future of e-readers was, and remains, unclear. As mobile phone displays grow larger and tablets shrink in price, there are questions about whether e-readers will be rendered redundant.

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Alex Arifuzzaman, a partner in Interstratics Consultants Inc., says he thinks e-readers offer good value at the moment.

“I think they’re in a good place right now, but it needs to innovate or adapt for the future in a really very highly competitive environment. In technology, things move really fast.”

Mikitani is not afraid of taking on a challenge. A former banker, he is now most often described as the billionaire owner of Rakuten Inc., the Amazon.com of Japan and an advisor to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe.

Under his ownership, the Kobo line has been completely remodeled, winning glowing reviews online. Yesterday, Kobo Inc. announced that its e-reader customer base grew by 2.5 million in the first quarter of 2013.

The private company says it now has 14.5 million registered users, with 15 per cent of its new users coming from the United States, where it competes with the popular Kindle and Nook devices.

Kobo CEO Michael Serbinis said the company is looking at markets in India and Russia and hopes to expand content to include more magazine content and graphic novels to attract new customers.

The company didn’t disclose its revenue.

The sprinting committed around Mikitani on his visit earlier this year to Toronto to promote his book, Marketplace 3.0, seemed to illustrate what he described as the service-minded culture of Japan, the ability to anticipate demand and fulfill it flawlessly.

“Even if you go to a very small local shop, or very small rest or coffee shop or even to the fast food, you experience a very high level of hospitality and I think that’s basically the way Japanese people are,” said Mikitani in an interview with the Star.

He said he hopes to export that hospitality to the world, via his online marketplace, Rakuten.com. In the U.S., it operates on the former Buy.com platform, which Mikitani also purchased in his stated mission to give Amazon.com founder and CEO Jeffrey Bezos a run for his money.

Rakuten.com is different from Amazon.com because it essentially rents virtual stalls to vendors, who can do what they like within that space. Amazon.com offers buyers a more uniform, standardized shopping experience, Mikitani says.

“I think Amazon is very efficient, but it’s not terribly interesting. I think the price and convenience is very important, but I believe shopping is not just about the price and convenience, it’s about the service you receive and the communication with the people who are selling it and it does need to be a very rich experience.”

Mikitani is notorious for what he calls “Englishnization,” a word and a concept he coined in 2010 when he suddenly ordered his entire staff to begin doing business in English in a country that instructs English in schools but graduates students who aren’t conversant. Mikitani felt translating was sapping energy and rendering his company — and Japanese businesses in general — less competitive.

The move earned him notoriety in his native country, but it also caught the attention of Prime Minister Abe, who appointed him to the Japan Competitive Council, formed to bring the island nation from the wings of the Internet revolution to centre stage.

Mikitani’s goal is turn Japan into Asia’s Silicon Valley, one acquisition at a time.

“Our market share for internet shopping in Japan is 30 per cent and we are much larger than the competition, including Amazon, and we would like to create the same marketplace in other countries,” he said.

Whether anyone is in a position today to overtake Amazon is not quite as murky as the future of e-readers.

“That’s a lofty standard, and I think that is not in the cards at this point,” said Arifuzzaman.

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